4 Ways SAP Application Hosting Services Can Make Your Job Easier

A lot of companies view their SAP investment as a complicated, pricey necessity. They may hold back from moving to a cloud hosting provider because of the perceived difficulty and security risks of a migration. But with the right SAP hosting services partner, moving to the cloud can help you better optimize your SAP landscape, and take the hosting burden away from your internal team.

1. SAP application hosting leads improved stability. The business world has gotten comfortable with using cloud hosting in situations where an outage or disruption isn’t going to be a huge problem. Companies routinely host things like exchange servers, quality assurance databases and test environments for large datasets in the cloud. However, many are still uncomfortable outsourcing cloud and hosting functions for mission critical applications.

Part of the problem is that the stakes are so high. Gartner estimates that businesses lose $5,600 on average for every minute of downtime. And it’s not like you can just reboot your ERP and call everything good; it can take hours to remediate SAP system issues, and finding the root cause of the outage and putting permanent fixes in place can take additional maintenance windows and downtime.

In reality, however, the high cost of outages is one of the strongest reasons to hire an SAP hosting partner like Symmetry. Onsite IT departments are forced to split their time between developing core business applications and running enterprise software, which can lead to delays in performing routine maintenance, or installing updates and patches. Even when they do have the time, they often lack the experience to optimize and maintain a complex ERP system.

Our SAP-certified staff specialize in hosting, running and securing SAP systems, providing our partners with a level of knowledge and experience few companies could afford to hire onsite. With daily tweaking and constant monitoring, we’ll catch problems before they lead to performance degradation and downtime. That’s why we have the highest SAP Basis customer satisfaction in the industry.

2. Better planning: Companies often let the business demands of SAP outgrow their SAP infrastructure without really noticing. For a while, everything keeps running as it should; applications load and update correctly, errors are corrected by Basis admins, and any slowdown is either barely noticed, or dismissed. Then, suddenly everything slows to a crawl. Worker productivity declines as job queues stack up, revenue drops as customers get sick of waiting for their transactions to complete, and the system gets less stable — one demand spike away from a crash.

Often, poor communication across levels prevents executives from learning about the problem in time. A good SAP Basis team would notice demand outpacing resources, but in many corporations, there’s no one for them to talk to; management just cares that the system is running well at the moment, and are reluctant to invest in new SAP implementations, migrations and upgrades — particularly with the cost of installing new onsite hardware. They assume there’s no reason to fix it until it’s broken, so inevitably it has to break before they’ll fix it.

Additionally, your SAP Basis support team probably doesn’t have expertise in SAP upgrades; they don’t know how to calculate increasing demand and correctly size new SAP hardware — after-all, why would you pay for that skillset, when you only need it every few years? By the time your SAP environment starts to reach its limits, the budget is set for the next quarter. Executives have to either go back to the board and beg for more money, or cross their fingers and hope performance doesn’t degrade too quickly over the next few months.

Symmetry’s cloud SAP application hosting team can make sure your system is prepared to support demand, while cutting the expense and complexity of upgrading your SAP landscape. We provide a better SAP Basis support team, skilled at anticipating growing hardware and software demands, and trained to communicate with both management and the technical side of your organization.

And, because your hardware is hosted in our cloud, you’ll be able to easily upgrade when you need more compute; that means better flexibility, with no costly hardware purchases or extended downtime.

3. More reliable project execution: There’s a reason planned ERP projects fill some executives with fear; a failed SAP migration or upgrade can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, send stocks tumbling, hemorrhage clients left and right and throw an entire organization into chaos for months. After all, it has happened before, to some of the biggest companies in the world, including Hershey Foods and Nike. Good IT project management is hard, but there are many easy ways to fail, including:

hiring under qualified, lowball “experts”

failing to adequately plan or benchmark the project

skimping on testing, backups, DR and other safeguards

bringing in too many different organizations, without adequate communication

With Symmetry’s SAP application hosting, big upgrades don’t have to be a gamble. Our technicians excel at big cloud and IT infrastructure projects, and our data centers remove the costs and complexity of installing new hardware.

Whether you’re executing a minor upgrade, an SAP HANA migration or a complete redesign of your system, we’ll present you with a step-by-step guide, outlining costs, dates and details for each phase of the project, including thorough testing and backup for every stage.

And we’ll stick with you post go-live, for performance tweaking, staff retraining and day-to-day operation of your new ERP system. That’s why leading enterprises like Carlisle Interconnect Technologies rely on Symmetry’s SAP Application Management Expertise for their SAP HANA upgrades and other major projects.

4. Better communication: The disconnect between management and IT doesn’t just affect timely upgrades — it can sandbag strategic decisions as well. It’s a problem that can’t be solved merely by getting execs to talk to IT, because business and tech often speak entirely different languages.

IT people understand how the hardware and software work, but often don’t understand the needs of the business; they might grasp the new features in a particular SAP S/4HANA application, for example, but have no idea how it would affect the day-to-day running of the company.

On the other hand, executives get how the business works, but often don’t understand how the software supports it; they can’t make informed decisions about what to upgrade or redesign, because they don’t know what the choices mean. As a result, both the technical knowledge of the IT department and the strategic skills of management goes to waste, harming the organization’s ability to stay competitive.

Symmetry’s SAP team goes beyond ERP managed services to help organizations fill the communication gap. We take a client management approach, training our teams to talk to people at every level of the organization, from entry-level workers to c-level management. That means more strategic IT decisions, fewer bugs and glitches, and better follow-through on everything from big projects to daily security and compliancebest practices. You’ll be able to take full advantage of our expertise, and more importantly, of your own.

SAP application hosting is about more than where you put your data. Symmetry offers a complete SAP solution, with far-reaching benefits across the organization. Our SAP HANA cloud and SAP hosting services will give you better uptime and performance in day-to-day operations, safer and less expensive executions of big IT projects, and better communication, leading to smarter business decisions. Contact us to learn what our SAP application hosting can do for your business.

Curtis has a unique ability to deliver technical knowledge to create customs solutions per the client requirements, by not only taking the technical specifications into consideration but also the business drivers particular to that organization in turn creating an optimal SAP environment. This skilled approached includes scoping, planning, and execution of various projects including Migrations/Upgrades/Installs, Hosting and ongoing Managed Services. He also stays abreast of the latest technologies such as road mapping solutions for client’s to leverage SAP HANA® in their current environment to then be hosted in Symmetry’s state-of- the -art Datacenter.